Twenty-two years ago, a horrific tragedy befell the United States of America: four airplanes were hijacked and weaponized in a terrorist attack resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans.
The initial response was a period of silent solidarity of nearly all the peoples of the nation; it was a time when Americans remembered their lost brethren and comforted of one another in the darkest hour of our nation’s history.
What is most strongly felt today, however, are the wars and policies this tragedy inspired.
First alerted to the attacks while reading a story to children at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, then President George W. Bush’s initial response was to announce the tragedy to the nation honoring the victims with a moment of silence.
In an almost unprecedented period of national unity, Bush helped the nation to come together with hope for its future.
This unity between families of victims, first responders from New York City, New York to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and nearly every citizen in the nation, helped bring cohesion in the wake of an attempt at chaos.
Close to home near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was the crash of Flight 93. In a recent interview from the Flight 93 memorial with UPJ teacher Paul Newman, Mark Ware, a volunteer firefighter among the early responders to the site of the crash, recalled his experience on that scarring day.
“They sent a contingency of firefighters out to meet the families. They brought them in by bus, and that was when it became real. That’s when the human factor entered into the plane crash. Before, it was just debris, it was unreal, it was just a crash site; but when the families came in the next day and you put a face on the people that were there, it became real,” Ware said.
Noting that the initial period of violent confusion before the debris of the World Trade Center lacked a human face, the event found a human face when firefighters meet the families of 9/11 victims.
On October 7, 2001, the United States began an invasion of Afghanistan as part of the War on Terror declared in the wake of 9/11; on 1 March 20, 2003, the United States began another invasion as part of the War on Terror, this time in Iraq.
Utilizing the tragedy as justification, paradoxically the lives of 2,977 Americans were avenged with the deaths of 4,421 Americans in Iraq and, more infamously, 2,420 Americans in the War in Afghanistan, a war that left the Taliban with greater control and territory than when the war began.
In possibly America’s most controversial war since Vietnam, the War on Terror has cost the sacrifice of lives comparable to the tragedy for no discernable gain destabilizing an already unstable region and bringing death to countless more citizens of Iraq with no connections to the forces that caused the original tragedy.
The PATRIOT Act, another tragedy to emerge from the War on Terror would prove perhaps even more controversial. Expanding the scope of surveillance within the United States, it would come to be viewed as one of the highest-scale erosions of freedom by the US Government over its people in recent history.
And it would cost a crisis of confidence in American leadership; Bush’s record-high Presidential approval rating of 90% on Sep. 21, 2001 would eventually be overshadowed by a record-low Presidential approval rating of 25% on multiple points in 2008, per Gallup.com. This unparalleled disparity in Presidential popularity is a bitter, statistical reflection of a lack of wisdom in America’s response to 9/11.
As human tragedy befalls the United States once again with the COVID-19 Pandemic, which taken the lives of 1,144,539 Americans, the distortion of a previous loss of life remains a bitter lesson to be learned: do not let tragedies justify more tragedies.